Abstract
This chapter presents a narrative case study, or “illuminating portrait,” of Jeremiah, a dedicated musician and music student. The methodology combines narrative research methods with an “arts-based” approach where the collected data, or “lived experience material” (observations, and interview material) is re-presented as “story.” With this “research as story” approach, the author uses imagination and literary style in order to create an aesthetic, virtual reality, which is intended to engage the reader in a deeper connection with, and an “insider” perspective of, the musical lifeworld of Jeremiah. This approach contrasts with presenting research where the experience of the participant is viewed from an objective position and is left as a disconnected and disaggregated product or “finding.”
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Notes
- 1.
The original form was presented as part of my doctoral thesis (Cleaver 2004).
- 2.
A self-selected pseudonym—after the popular song Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.
- 3.
Stauffer and Barrett (2009) have described “resonance” in lifework as “an ethical grounding and imperative for narrative work” (p. 20). “Resonant work will have four qualities: it is respectful, responsible, rigorous and resilient” (see pp. 19–27 for complete description of these qualities).
- 4.
Bruner (1986) identified two contrasting universal human cognitive modes, the logico-scientific or paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. In addition to “ways of construing reality,” he also described them as “meaning-bearing forms of communication,” “modes of reasoning, knowing and understanding.” He added that although the modes are contrasted and distinct, they are also “complimentary but irreducible to one another” (p. 11). The paradigmatic is dedicated to “truth-finding” and is “the prerogative of science and logic” while narrative reasoning is directed to the situated and contextual ways that humans experience the world (p. 148). I argue that the paradigmatic also aligns with the “cause-effect, hypothetico-deductive system of reasoning” described by Kincheloe (1991, p. 44). In Cleaver (2010) I present further understandings surrounding the narrative and paradigmatic modes.
- 5.
In the thesis (Cleaver 2004) I made links from the fields of philosophy to music and the objectivist “masking of experience” within the tradition of Western Art music. Notably, Bowman (1998) discusses how an objectivist understanding of music places it ontologically “outside the mind” and epistemologically as having meaning existing independently of any consciousness. He recognises that the ontological and epistemological gulf between mind and body leads to a detachment from music, as it is “actually lived or experienced” (p. 300). Musical objectivism has been critically discussed by Small (1998) and also Woodford and Dunn (1998).
- 6.
What about “wrestling” with Descartes and Buddha? The process of researching others’ lives included reflection on barriers between self and other. I could not separate this from prior interest in Eastern philosophy, which traditionally is not separated from religion. Contrasting East and West, I believed that the Cartesian dualism (mind/being/self, as distinct from matter/body/physical world) might equate with separation from Brahman, Buddha nature or the (real, egoless) Self. Freedom from the Cartesian trap requires union, Self-realisation or as Wittgenstein states—“the fly is let out of the fly-bottle” (1968, p. 103). Within the trap, the “I am” is in the world. With release, the world is in the Self—but my “wrestling” in that regard is another story.
- 7.
- 8.
This point is described in the Prologue.
- 9.
See Macdonald et al. (2002) for detailed explorations of musical identity and identity in music.
- 10.
Bruner (1996) discusses folk knowledge and folk pedagogy. However, put into my own Rumsfeldian terms I recognise that “there are known knowns that we know how we know them and there are known knowns that we do not know how we know them.” I connected this to my own experience of the contrast between intuitive and theoretical understandings associated with musicianship.
- 11.
Polkinghorne describes plot lines as “organizing themes that identify the significance and the role of the individual events” (1988, p. 18).
- 12.
- 13.
The work of Lucy Green (2001) informed and influenced my exploration of informal and formal music education.
- 14.
My exploration of the difference between narrative meaning (subjective—concerned with “contextual meaning for the teller of the tale” and which is built on a personally constructed reality) and paradigmatic meaning (objective—related to “truth”—meaning that is not contextual and that assumes a mind independent reality) was a focal theme of the thesis (Cleaver 2004). I presented this as a paradox where in a process of self-discovery and reflection I explored these as two aspects of (my) self.
- 15.
Paradoxically, one story is a deliberate “separation”—the exploration of different “modes of mind” (described autoethnographically in Cleaver 2010), the “other” story relates to “union”—the engagement with Cartesian dualism described at footnote 5.
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Cleaver, D. (2012). Jeremiah Jones and the Musical Crusade. In: Barrett, M., Stauffer, S. (eds) Narrative Soundings: An Anthology of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0699-6_3
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